Personalized Health and Related Technologies (PHRT) is a strategic focus area of the ETH Domain, running from 2017-2025, which encompasses six Swiss institutions: ETHZ, EPFL, PSI, Empa, Eawag and WSL. The main goal of PHRT is to drive the ongoing life science revolution that will ultimately transform medicine as it is today into ‘individualized medicine’. In essence, a person’s unique biological makeup will guide decisions on how to maintain and restore health. Thanks to its community of researchers, associated hospitals and cooperation with partner organizations such as SPHN and SDSC, PHRT is pushing the frontiers of knowledge on the mechanisms of diseases and opening the door to new treatments and technologies improving health and disease treatments.
Advances in life science and information technology allow researchers to collect and analyze large volumes of health data. This can include clinical data, multi-omics data (e.g., genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.), imaging data, data from biobanks, and health data collected by physicians and individuals. These advancements have opened up the possibility to use each patient’s individual molecular makeup and characteristics as a basis for guiding medical decisions, preserving health and discovering and improving therapies.
PHRT has regularly launched calls for proposals during which ETH Domain researchers could submit their research project applications. These calls were specific to precise types of projects, but usually a call encompassed different types of projects.
Calls in, collaboration with partner organizations, served to support research in precision and personalized medicine in Switzerland.
